


you're the only one who can save me

by EllenRipley



Category: The Originals (TV), The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, Fluff and Angst, Klaroline
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-24 19:30:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9781928
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllenRipley/pseuds/EllenRipley
Summary: Caroline needs to get away from the heartache while she waits outside of Mystic Falls, dreaming of home.





	1. you're not here; won't move on

Caroline Forbes’ thoughts wandered as aimlessly as the two feet that kept dragging her on, pulling her inexorably toward the light of the city not that far away. While her feet moved, her eyes caught the beauty of the wild world behind her, of the lit skyscrapers before her, and she couldn’t even enjoy how pretty it was. The trees were all picturesque and the city lights were like a long string of Christmas lights and everything was just so darn _pretty_ but she was too busy dying to enjoy it properly.

How had it all come down to this? But she knew of course that this was her fault. She had decided to do something selfish and foolish and now, she was paying the piper.

She had woken up that morning with the unending desire to get out of town. Things had been so rough since both Bonnie and Damon had disappeared along with the Other Side. The loss of her best friend, Stefan’s running off without so much as a good-bye, and Elena’s seeming unwillingness to grieve for the loss of Damon had grown to be too much. She had grabbed some clothes, thrown her stuff into her car, and headed south before she even recognized that she had made a conscious decision to get out of town. She hadn’t even bothered to leave a note or text her friends; she had just gotten up and left without a word.

It was completely unlike her. She wasn’t the irresponsible one. She wasn’t the one to just go off on the spur of the moment. She was the one who held hands and helped people through the hard times. She was the one to rally the masses together. She and Elena should have been grieving together.

But instead of both she and Elena growing closer, bonding over their mutual grief at the loss of Bonnie, they had grown further apart. She couldn’t even talk to Stefan about any of this since he wouldn’t answer her calls. He had shut her out just as clearly as Elena had. She felt awful all the time, wanting to go back home as though that would solve her problems.

As she had woken to yet another day of being barred from her childhood haunts, from not being able to talk to Bonnie about how odd Elena was acting, the unending silence from Stefan, she had just snapped. That was really the only way to describe what had happened, she figured. She had snapped and now, she was paying for her selfish behavior.

The drive south had been fine and relaxing. It was, she had found, exactly what she needed after everything that had happened to her and her friends. Driving with the windows down and the music turned up, singing with Beyoncé and Lady Gaga had done wonders for her. Sometimes, she realized, you just had to get up and go, no matter the consequences.

After being on the road for hours, her cell phone had died. She, of course, had a cell phone charger for her car and hadn’t worried about it. When she had pulled over to plug her phone in and take a quick break from driving, she remembered that she had left her car charger in Elena’s car. She decided not to dwell on how her charger wasn’t doing her any good whatsoever in her friend’s car.

She had a map, she assured herself. She would be _fine_.

She turned to the local radio stations, switching back and forth between something country like with unknown songs and something a little happy and pop-like. When she had entered the bayou, she had found it harder and harder to find cheerful, peppy music but hadn’t been discouraged. The scenery was gorgeous and took her mind off of the loss of music.

It was then, of course, when she was in the middle of absolutely _nowhere_ , and maybe an hour outside of the city, that her car had started to overheat. Her car that was in tiptop shape. Her beautiful baby that she had taken for every oil change, every break job, every tire rotation exactly on time to ensure that her car’s performance was always at peak. Her car that should have been able to get her from point A to point B even after driving all day.

She hadn’t even bothered to pop the hood, knowing that she had no idea what she would have been looking at anyway. She left it parked on the side of the road with a nice little note wrapped around the driver’s side windshield wiper asking anyone who pulled over to not worry as a tow truck was coming. She had hoped that her little note wasn’t a lie and that she would manage to find a tow truck willing to drive out there to pick up her car.

Even with all of that, she still managed to feel happy and cheerful. She kept reminding herself that she was on an _adventure_. This was great! As annoying as it was to suddenly need to hike through unknown terrain, she was Caroline Forbes. She knew how to take a few hits and keep on going with both grace and finesse. She had been Miss Mystic Falls; she could handle _anything_.

It was full dark and when the moon rose, full and swollen in the night, she had begun to rethink how much she could actually handle. She knew that werewolves ran rampant through the bayou, but when no howls curled their way through the trees, she had thought she would be safe. She had hoped, anyway.

When the werewolf had shown up with the lights of the city in the distance, she had quickly decided that she could not in fact handle _anything_. She had also rethought her entire trip, her need for a selfish moment, and damned herself twice for not leaving a note for someone. They would all be worried about her, or should have been, and she was going to die because of some stray wolf in the woods.

At the sight of those pointy teeth and golden glowing eyes, she had taken off through the woods. She kept herself moving in a zig zag pattern, heading slowly but surely to the southwest. She was zipping as fast as she could before she had to come to a complete stop to catch her breath. Of course, she wound up surrounded by three more werewolves when she stopped.

Before she could really feel the fear that beat in her heart, two more wolves showed up behind her. Their eyes had glowed gold in the bright moonlight and she had to ask herself how she had thought a rogue trip south was a good idea on a full moon. “Hi,” she had said cheerfully, “I’m Caroline and I’m a really nice vampire. I don’t have any problems with werewolves, honest.”

A nasty growl from a wolf to her right greeted her nervous words. She couldn’t think of what to do, how she was supposed to get out of this. Her best defense was to run off, to go fast, but if she tried to cut through the circling beasts, she was almost sure one of them would manage to sink their fangs into her. Her decision was stolen from her as another werewolf came out of the darkness at a deadly lope, snapping its teeth at her.

She had backed up quickly, side stepping out of the creature’s way. She managed to evade the second wolf that darted in to attack, but hadn’t moved fast enough out of the third wolf’s way. Its jaws and teeth made contact with the soft flesh of her belly. She had cried out and slammed her two hands down against the furry creature buried fang deep in her body. She had felt the venom pump into her body. In shock all she could do was jump over the body of the crumpled beast and flash passed the remaining wolves, willing her body to move faster and faster.

And then she had continued on.

If she was going to die, she certainly wasn’t going to be doing so in the woods of all places she decided. She would die on her own terms, surrounded by her friends and family, saying good-bye to her mother for the last time. Besides, she didn’t want to die. It wasn’t just that she wanted to live, to continue living her life to the fullest, but a great heart-wrenching fear of where she was supposed to go now that the Other Side was gone. She couldn’t face the idea that she would just cease to exist when she finally _did_ die.

She paused and rested against a tree. She could see the city far more clearly now and figured, maybe hope was on the horizon.

Caroline clung to hope probably more than her friends realized. Sometimes it was the only thing that helped her to get up in the morning or to go through the motions as she continued to live her life. The loss of her core group of friends had wounded her more than she let on. She understood the reason why everyone was hiding out in their own cocoons of misery, but she hoped that one day things would go back to normal.

Right then, she could only hope that she would survive.

She felt that she had enough time to get to a safe place before the venom really began to affect her. She had been bitten in the past and knew what to expect at least. She figured she had a few hours before she really began to feel bad, too bad to do much more than whimper at the idea that she was going to die. In the interest of hope, she figured that gave her enough time to get to where she was going.

She zipped her sweater all the way up to hide the blood on her shirt and then pushed herself forward, flashing down into the city. She maneuvered through packs of roaming tourists and locals, hearing snippets of people speak with southern accents, with Midwest accents, with northern accents, and with French accents that were barely discernible. Periodically, she would stop to catch her breath, ignoring the painful zing of the venom coursing through her veins.

She had poured over maps of New Orleans during one of her stops on the highway, trying to figure out how to get from the bayou into the French Quarter itself. She hadn’t really given much thought as to why it had been New Orleans that she had decided to head to. It hadn’t even been much of an idea, she assured herself, until she had seen the sign welcoming her to Georgia after going through the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

After she had crossed a waterway, she slowed yet again and was almost overtaken by the beautiful sight of the historic first neighborhood of New Orleans. She still had time, she figured, before she began to hallucinate. She wanted to see the world, see the city that Klaus had spoken of in a voicemail on her phone. She had tried to picture the city after listening to that message, pulling up pictures of the place during Mardis Gras and afterward.

But she couldn’t let herself be overawed by all of this. She had to get to Klaus, beg him to help her _yet again_. She had wanted to show up, surprise him with a smile, and ask him to show her his fair city. That was as far as she had gotten when she had finally come to the conclusion that she wasn’t really running away from her life, but going to Klaus.

She had wanted to experience the beauty of New Orleans with him by her side, not simply because deep down, she wanted to see him again, but to also experience the love he so obviously had for this place. She could understand it now, seeing it in person. It was beautiful.

She shook her head to clear it and walked slowly down first one street and then another. She didn’t know where she was going, she had to admit. She had figured out how to get here, but that was as far as she had gotten. She had assumed her phone would be working and she could call him to meet her somewhere. But now that the option was taken away, she wasn’t sure where to go.

All of a sudden, it seemed ridiculous to rely so heavily on hope.

She was beginning to feel a little sick to her stomach, nausea so intense that she had to close her eyes and swallow back the bile. “Are you all right, _ma chère?”_ She opened her eyes and looked into gentle brown eyes. The man in front of her was looking at her with a look of concern on his face and for a moment, she could have cried. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had been concerned for _her_.

“I’m fine,” she forced out, offering him a tight smile in response. Neither her words nor her smile seemed to allay his fears. “Actually, I’m just a little lost.” She had an idea. “Are you from around here?”

“Of course,” the man said, eyes sparkling in the street light.

“Great,” she replied, feeling relief coursing through her veins. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. We were supposed to meet at a building.” She went on to describe the building that Matt had said Rebekah had told him about after she rescued him from the safe. The man began nodding as she spoke, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“I know it,” he agreed with a smile. Using his hands to gesture, he painted a picture of directions. She listened carefully, looking in the direction he pointed. She focused on his hands even as her attention tried to wander to the delightful beat of the pulse point at his throat. “Think you can get there?” He asked as he finished.

“Yes,” she said, grateful. “Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome,” the man said and wandered back off into the crowd.

She took a long deep breath, trying to keep herself from retching at the smells of alcohol and sweat. As she listened, she could hear a hundred different heartbeats pounding no more than feet away from her. She shook her head to clear it, reminding herself forcefully to focus on the task at hand. She hurried off, keeping herself at a human pace this time so that she could stop to read the street signs as she passed.

As she neared the giant building that the Original vampires had turned into their home, she couldn’t help but feel nervous. She thought that she was most likely being ridiculous. Technically, she was dying and she was more worried about what would happen when she showed her face. As ridiculous as it may have seemed, she couldn’t stop herself. Her thoughts wound themselves into a tizzy until all she could focus on was her own anxiety at seeing Klaus again.

What would he say when she showed up asking for his help _again_? Would he willingly give it? Would he enact more promises? Would he be happy to see her? Would he think that this meant she had come to him to stay for good?

She wasn’t sure, but she at least realized that it didn’t necessarily matter. She didn’t just want to live, she also wanted to see Klaus. There was something about him that had always beckoned to her, just as there had seemingly been something about her that always seemed to beckon him.

The one thing she had known as she drew closer and closer to New Orleans was that she could share the secret of her frustrations and he wouldn’t judge her for it. It was mean and cruel and harsh of her to feel that way. She knew it. She was a good person and yet, she couldn’t help but to sit back and think about how angry with her friends she was. Klaus would understand her and she needed that understanding instead of constantly feeling guilty.

She walked around the building and felt a wave of dizziness overtake her. She stopped moving and leaned against the cool stone façade. It was then that she realized she was starting to sweat. She was annoyed that she was going to see Klaus for the first time in months and look like hell warmed over. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the sleeve of her hoody and pushed herself forward.

The building was massive, she realized, as she turned a corner and found what she thought was the entrance. It was a giant archway with one of the gates partially open, as though beckoning her inside. People walked by the dimly lit entrance while she leaned heavily against the wall, peering into the gloom. She could just see a giant courtyard on the other side of the deep archway with furniture covered in white sheets strategically placed throughout.

There was no one that she could see inside.

Lifting her head high, she walked through the cave-like entrance until she was inside the courtyard, shutting the gate completely behind her. Still, no one came out to greet her and she was beginning to wonder if this was even the right place. It had the feel of grandiosity though that she knew Klaus liked. It felt… well, it felt _right_. If that was the case, and this was where the Originals lived, then where were they? She hadn’t expected to be greeted at the door, but she had expected some sign of life.

She closed her eyes, assuring herself that she just needed a moment to compose herself, to catch her breath and then she would worry about where everyone was. She leaned back against the wall opposite a staircase and then felt her knees let go. She sank down against the ground, keeping her eyes closed so that she wouldn’t have to fight back the oncoming tears.

She had hoped he would just be there, just waiting for her like some stupid romance book or something, and he wasn’t. She was silly, she knew, to be disappointed. This wasn’t a movie, this wasn’t a book. He hadn’t known she was coming and a rational part of her mind kept assuring her that she was being that much sillier since she was, for all intents and purposes, _dying_. But she couldn’t bring herself to focus on that. If she did, she was going to break down even worse than she already was.

She opened her eyes and forced herself to her feet. If he wasn’t here, she was going to at least go inside and lay down, maybe snoop around if she didn’t feel too badly. Although she was beginning to feel worse and worse as the seconds clicked by. Soon, she would begin to hallucinate. She didn’t want to be out in the open where an innocent bystander may accidentally get injured by her hallucination.

Caroline strode purposefully towards the staircase, her eyes focused on the prize. The prize, of course, was going into Klaus’ home, assuming the doors were unlocked, and figuring out what Klaus had been up to since they had last seen one another. It would be nice, she decided, to have the drop on him, to know what he had been doing wiling away his time before he finally showed his face with its usual smirk.

Her steps were slow and ringing in her ears. She could barely lift her feet, they felt like they weighed a hundred pounds each. She had made it halfway through the courtyard when a familiar accented voice rang out from above: “Caroline?”

She looked up and there he was. He was standing on the balcony, looking down at her with an unreadable expression – no smirk, no sly smile, no excited thrill at the look of her. It was almost like he was trying to keep himself hidden, keep her from reading him. Except that she _could_ read him because she could _always_ read tell where his thoughts were.

She could see the surprise and curiosity hiding in his eyes, the concern and happiness all warring themselves out against each other. It was all written there, clear as day and it was like a cold drink on a hot day. It soothed a part of her that had worried he wouldn’t be happy to see her, that he had given up on her. It also made her feel better to know that, even with all the time that had passed, she could still sense where he was coming from, what he was thinking when he did things. “Klaus,” she whispered. She went to say more, but found herself unable to speak.

There was an annoying pounding in her ears and it just kept getting louder as the seconds ticked by. She felt a chill and then a ripple of heat worm its way across her scalp and down the back of her spine. A frown of concern passed across his features and she smiled back at him, what she hoped was a winning pageant worthy smile.

Then she was falling and the world went dark.


	2. fed on nothing but full of pride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Klaus is stuck in a dark place, unable to hit back at the wolves who have stolen his strength and unable to bring his daughter back home. Luckily, a vampire Barbie has unexpectedly shown up at just the right time.

Klaus Mikaelson sat in his art studio on another full moon night, feeling the weakness of the moonlight rings draining him. He wanted to scream and rage, he wanted to break everything within reach, but all he could do was sit pressed against the wall of his studio and stare at the blank canvases waiting for his attention. All he could do was sit still and feel like he was going crazy for another night, another month; how long was this hell supposed to last?

He understood the need to sit back and wait. Strategy was nothing if not second nature to him. Elijah was, as always, correct in how best to proceed after the faked loss of his daughter, after the attempt on his daughter’s life by the witches and the wolves. Just because he understood the need to sit quiet, to give the appearance of grief at the loss of Hope, didn’t mean that the need for his enemies’ blood to flow through the streets was any less pressing.

It gnawed at him like a cancerous ball of hatred that grew ever more potent on the night of the full moon. Every month, he closeted himself away from the world and felt the weakness of his spirit grow more and more. It was like the wolves, instead of just taking his strength when they had consecrated the rings in his blood, they had stolen a little bit of his soul. And each month, they devoured it more and more. He felt like he was going crazy.

Not of all of it, though, was merely because of those blasted wolves and their bloody moonlight rings.

The loss of Hope was a real and ragged hole in the center of his being. Elijah and Hayley may both have believed that he had only had desires to create more hybrids or to use his daughter in some nefarious plot, but he had truly loved her. Even as an unknown movement beneath Hayley’s growing womb, he had pinned all of his hopes for his future and his family on her just as Elijah had.

The loss of her was more than just a hole of pain at the center of his person; it was as if his very heart had been ripped out of his chest. Grief suffused his world so deeply that he could not find a single ray of sunshine. His entire world was shades of bleakest darkness. He had thought he knew what pain and suffering were, but everything he had felt up to then was but a drop in the bucket compared to his unending sorrow that he had to send his beautiful daughter away for her own good.

Hayley was no better, he knew. She was grieving just as much as he was, or more likely more than he. She had carried their daughter, succored her from her own body, and she had been forced to send her away after hardly having met her.

Klaus didn’t know how to help her. He knew that they should be grieving together, mingling the shared loss of their daughter but he couldn’t reach out to her. He assumed that it would be Elijah anyway who would stem the flow of Hayley’s sorrow, but in her grief, she had pulled away from the one person who would have willingly comforted her.

To be fair, Klaus could admit that he kept away from her, strayed away from her grief on purpose. It was more than just a fear of showing her his weakness, his grief and possibly being rebuffed for the attempt. It was a deep seated terror that she would hate _him_ for the loss of their daughter. He didn’t think he could bear such a thing. Somehow, some way, the little wolf had managed to become as much a part of his family as Rebekah or Elijah.

Elijah seemed to be the only one who could deal with the loss of their hopes and dreams in the form of the beautiful baby girl that Klaus had given to his sister to watch over. But Klaus wasn’t a fool. He knew that Elijah had fallen in love with his daughter long before even he had and that he, too, suffered the loss keenly.

Elijah was putting on an act by continuing in the day-to-day ministrations of their city, playing a game of chess to solidify their hold on a city they had built, on a city that had been ripped away from them in a blink of an eye. Or perhaps throwing himself into the plans within plans that they needed to take their home back was how he dealt with his grief. It benefitted Klaus to have Elijah at the helm, not only allowing to truly grieve for Hope but to also lull the wolves into a false sense of security.

One day…

Klaus brought his knees up and rested his elbows against them, pressing the palms of his hands into his eyes. He couldn’t get the sweet final image of his baby girl out of his head. She was in his arms as he held her out to Rebekah to take to some unknown safe harbor. She was beautiful; he hadn’t really expected anything less being his and Hayley’s daughter. And the beauty of her face haunted him day and night.

Sometimes, he thought that perhaps he should pluck the haunting image from his mind, rip his eyes out and dig deep into his mind so that he could stop it. Hope haunted him as steadily as any spirit could have. But when he thought seriously of stopping the memories, the feelings, from racking his body, he knew he couldn’t, wouldn’t. He needed those fleeting moments of his daughter as much as he needed blood.

Even as the memory of her weakened him, it also gave him strength. It reenergized his purpose to almost a painful degree. Everything that they would do would eventually bring her back to him. He would one day be able to hold her in his arms, show her the world he was making for her.

As his mind ran through the moments of that final parting with his daughter, he heard something coming from the courtyard. He pushed himself up, wondering how someone had gotten in. He had kept the gates closed and locked. The one door that led to the courtyard had been locked, or so he assumed. Had Elijah made a mistake? Had someone left the courtyard open on the _one_ night of the month where he was at his weakest?

As he moved to a window, he saw a light haired shadow pressed back against the wall opposite the staircase. He may have been weakened from the moonlight rings and his own grief, but his eyesight was still just as keen as it had been a few hours before. The blond haired shadow pushed itself away from the wall and he felt a punch to his gut as Caroline’s face resolved itself in the moonlight.

He hurried from the studio, moving with inhuman speed. As he came out of his home, he stood on the balcony overlooking the courtyard. He rested his hands against the railing and felt his heartbeat pounding wildly in his ears as Caroline slowly walked through the courtyard. “Caroline?”

She looked up at him with her beautiful eyes like a storm-ridden sea and he felt her gaze like an arrow to the heart. He couldn’t understand how it was possible that Caroline Forbes was in his courtyard. She hadn’t called, hadn’t warned him that she was coming. He felt unprepared, unable to handle her sudden appearance in his life. The fact that she had managed to make it through the French Quarter without being used as a lesson by the damn wolves to lord over the vampires and witches was practically a miracle.

He was thrilled to see her, of course, so happy, but also surprised and curious. Why had she chosen now to come? If she had told him that she was coming, he would have told her that now was not the best time and asked her what she needed from him. He would have, of course, done what he could for her even so far away as they would have necessarily needed to remain.

“Klaus,” she whispered. When she smiled at him, he knew something was wrong. She was pale, as though she hadn’t fed, and her voice had wavered when she spoken, but it was the smile that gave it all away. She was striving for her usual award winning smile, the one that could light up his world for years. But it was as though the lightbulb were getting ready to go out; it flickered and died.

The moment her body began to crumple to the ground, he was moving before he even knew he had moved. He had caught her before she had fallen to the ground, clutching her to him as he reversed direction to bring her into the Abattoir. He was alarmed to feel how hot she was and even more so when he saw her break into a fresh sweat as he moved through the house, bringing her into one of the many sitting rooms. He could smell her blood wafting from some hidden place and his concern doubled.

He lay her down on a settee and instantly began searching for the source of the blood. As he ripped off the black sweater exposing her wound to him, she whimpered and shivered. “You’re all right, Caroline,” Klaus assured her shivering body as he took in the extent of the wound.

The tank top she wore beneath the thin sweater had been torn. It looked as though whatever had managed to sink its teeth into her flesh had been intent on mauling her, going for the spot where the human body had no protection against a predator. Somehow she had managed to escape. He could scent the werewolf venom mixed with her blood.

White hot rage suffused him and he wanted nothing more than to go out right then to kill whatever wolves were outside the city, _his_ city. How dare they?! Instead of reacting to his instincts, the ones screaming at him to get up and kill, he bit his wrist savagely. He pulled Caroline up by her arm, spinning her into his lap until her back was pressed against his torso. “Sweetheart,” he murmured gently in her ear as he pressed his bleeding wrist to her mouth.

She didn’t immediately react to his blood, didn’t immediately reach up and press his wrist to her mouth. He didn’t feel the needle sharp fangs slip into the wound and for a moment, he felt true fear. Was he too late? When had she been injured? “Caroline?” He whispered and he could hear his own fear reverberating back to his ears in his voice. What if she didn’t wake up? Who would think he was “human” if she died? How could he be her last love if she…?

Her hands shot up then and he felt the press of her fangs into his open wound. Relief poured through him as she began to drink his blood eagerly. She moaned a little at the taste of his blood and he found himself thrilled by the sounds coming from her throat. She was alive. She would live another day and he would see her sweet smile again, he would hear her say his name again.

As she fed, he found his free hand reaching up to brush the backs of his fingers against the left side of her face. He watched his fingers in fascination, unwilling to try to bring them back down to his side. Her skin was as soft as he remembered. Even underneath the smell of blood and werewolf venom, she still smelled like the soap she favored: calla lily and lavender.

When finally her fangs retracted, he felt a sense of loss that made no sense. It was as though her feeding on him was an additional stratum of the bond that had somehow managed to wend its way around them both. And when she moved back away from his wrist, away from his blood, it was as if that part of their bond had broken.

She turned her head and looked up at him, her blue-green eyes daggering him in the heart faster and more completely than any blade. “Wow,” she breathed and her smile was the award winning smile he had been denied earlier. His heart raged in his chest at that smile. She could undo him completely when she smiled at him. “I found you,” she said, turning more in his lap. “I really did find you.”

“So you did, luv,” he replied. “Why were you searching for me?”

“Well, I definitely hoped that you would heal me, but that’s not why I decided to come down here,” she assured him quickly. Her eyes were sweet, innocent, endearing. They cut him to the quick. With all of the horror of the last few months, the weakness caused by the witches’ moonlight rings and the loss of his daughter, he felt a renewed sense of hope just being in the same room as this goddess whose smile was sunlight and whose lips whispered hopes and dreams.

She moved herself off his lap, a faint pink hue staining her cheeks. Even her embarrassment was sweet and endearing, he realized, as she sat across from him. Her eyes searched his face, looking for something that he couldn’t understand. He found himself returning the favor, studying her face as though he hadn’t already memorized it.

He reached up and brushed her hair back from her face. He couldn’t help but think that she was the most beautiful thing in the world in that moment. His life was a nightmare most of the time, but this sweet golden child would drag him back from the darkness or so he hoped.

“You shouldn’t be here, sweetheart,” Klaus said finally, coming back to reality. “Things are… complicated here,” he explained.

Her brows knit in concern and he was floored to realize it was concern for _him_ that darkened her eyes, furrowed her brow. He wanted to kiss that worry away, tell her not to be so anxious for his sake. “What’s happening, Klaus?” Caroline asked him. She reached out as though to touch his face, as though to wipe away whatever demons she could see staring back at her from his eyes, but her hand fell back to her lap.

He watched her take in their surroundings, looking around the sitting room outside of his art studio with practice and ease. When she turned back to look into his eyes, the concern on her face had magnified. “What’s wrong?” she demanded.

“Caroline, there is nothing for you to be worried over,” he assured her with false bravado. He couldn’t help but hear the voice in the back of his mind, the one that said he could unburden himself of his worries, of his fears, of his concerns, of the loss of his daughter and share the darkness with this sweet creature. This baby vampire before him seemed only concerned for his well-being – a novel concept in and of itself – and he wanted to experience that for himself.

He hadn’t realized until then just how much he wanted to have someone to take into his confidence, someone who could possibly see his rationalization for why he undertook the things he did. Of course, he knew that Caroline wouldn’t necessarily agree with why he did what he did, no matter how he explained it. She may be able to see his motives and would most likely disagree with them, but she could at least forgive him for the horrors he inflicted on others. That was more than others were willing to do when it came to him.

She stood up and looked down at him. “You’re lying to me,” she told him. “But, if you really think I should just go because clearly it’s not ‘safe’ for me here, then I’ll go.” She was hurt, he realized, but he couldn’t understand why. He hadn’t told her anything that she shouldn’t have already known herself. Was it possible that Mystic Falls had no idea just how precarious things were outside of their own little bubble?

She started away from him, but went in the wrong direction. She entered his art studio and he followed, congratulating himself on having only a two minute conversation with her before she was in a huff because of him. And all he was trying to do was protect her from the city, from the wolves, and the witches! “How do I get out of here?” she snapped angrily at him, as he waltzed into the art studio after her.

“Caroline, please,” he started, “don’t be cross with me. I am doing what I can to keep you safe and that means, sending you back on your way. The city is…” He trailed off, not even sure how to describe what the city and its supernatural denizens were currently going through.

“Yeah, all right,” she told him flippantly. “Let me just walk right back to my broken car in werewolf infested wilderness.”

“What happened to your car, Caroline?” Klaus demanded. It explained why she had shown up on his doorstep, injured. He had a moment where he saw Caroline driving off of the road and crashing her car into a tree all because of some lone werewolf, wanting to take its vengeance on the vampire in the vehicle. In his vision, she was injured and bleeding; she never made it to his doorstep.

Instead of answering him, she walked up to the painting he had left pressed against the brick wall beneath a window. It was a pair of lips, a partial nose just above, painted in bright red. She looked down at the artwork, emotions flitting across her features too quickly for him to discern. “I like this,” she told him. “I don’t know why, but it just… there’s something innocent about it.”

“What do you mean?” He asked her softly.

She turned back to face him and there was something on her face, some horror in her eyes that he could see while she spoke. “It’s like the sweet innocence you see when you’re watching a baby sleep, watching them dream their little baby dreams,” she said quietly. “It’s this, like, perfect moment, but also a gut-wrenching moment for the person who’s doing the watching. There’s just… so much _love_ in that moment that you have to force yourself to breathe through it for the moment otherwise your heart might just stop because it can’t handle the fact that you feel so very much.” She looked back at the painting as she whispered, “I can’t remember what innocence is like.”

He sensed there was something more to this tirade, though he was thrilled that she knew _exactly_ what he had been hoping to capture when he had started the painting. He had, of course, been seeing his beautiful baby girl when he had put paintbrush to canvas. “Caroline… what is going on in Mystic Falls?” Klaus asked her. He kept his voice soft, docile, hoping to coax out of her why she had come to see him before he sent her off for her own good.

He had to admit that he had left Mystic Falls mostly alone. He hadn’t want to know what she was up to; how things had landed when Tyler had returned after he had finally taken her for his own even if only for a brief moment in time. He couldn’t keep focusing on her when he had a city to lay siege to and unite under his tutelage. But for all of the honest reasons he had stopped paying attention to that hamlet and its supernatural denizens, it was this blonde-haired beauty in front of him and his promise to her that kept him from spying on them.

He had promised to walk away and to him, having someone follow her and her friends, to keep tabs on every little going on had seemed like cheating. And to be true, if she ended up with Tyler again, and she was happy in that relationship yet again, he didn’t want to know. When he was sitting in the darkness of his art studio with no one else around, he could almost admit that he was a fucking coward.

Caroline looked back at him and he could see the tears in her eyes. Something had happened, he realized, and maybe that was why she had come to him. Something horrible had happened and he hadn’t known about it, wrapped up in his own problems, in his own need to just not know. “Oh, Klaus,” she whispered, and the tears spilled her cheeks. “Everything’s awful.”


	3. sew this hole up that you ripped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sharing of secrets, even things as dark and dreary as what Klaus and Caroline have been living through lately, is sometimes all one needs to feel like they have a reason to hope.

Caroline felt like an idiot for crying. She had sworn to herself that she was not going to cry in front of Klaus, that she was going to keep her composure as she unburdened herself to the one person who hadn’t been there, hadn’t gone through the pain and heartache that she had been suffering through lately.

At the back of her mind, she felt guilt for being angry with Elena and Stefan. She knew that they needed to grieve for all of the same losses as she did; more so really since they had both lost Damon. But at the end of the day, with each morning she woke up in a bed that wasn’t her own, she realized just how angry she was, just how fruitless everything felt.

Somewhere in that distant place in her mind, she knew she had to get it all out and into the open. She had to release her pent up rage, her feelings of sorrow, and the all-consuming idea that she should be doing _something_ to fix it though she didn’t know what. Of all the people she knew, she couldn’t help but think of Klaus as being the one who would understand why she felt the way that she did, even if she didn’t think she had a right to feel that way.

She was just so used to Stefan and Elena having a plan, of Alaric knowing what million year old book held the answers, of Bonnie knowing exactly what incantation to say that this hopelessness was almost a foreign concept.

She buried her face in her hands, unable to meet his gaze as she cried. She felt doubly selfish then. She had driven for an entire day, walked through the bayou and an unknown city to see this man standing before her and all she wanted to do was tell him all of this. She wanted to feel better and her friends only made her feel worse. The guilt began to gnaw at her again and her sobs grew louder in her ears, drowning out everything else.

Klaus couldn’t stand to see her crying. He swore in that moment that he would do anything to stop her from shedding her tears for this unknown reason. He would kill who he had to just to see her smile again. He didn’t even realize he had moved; one moment he was standing on the far side of the room and then the next, he was beside her, wrapping his arms around her.

She turned to him hungrily almost, flinging her arms around his midsection and crushing him to her. He was a little surprised by the intensity of her grip, but he returned the favor. He held her just as tightly to him, pressing his face into her hair as her hot tears soaked his shirt. Her hair smelled of wildlife and wind, but also of the sweet strawberry shampoo she used.

He slid his hands through her hair, murmuring nonsense in her ears just as a parent would to an inconsolable child. Feeling her in his arms was a subtle reminder that this was the woman he had sworn he would wait for. This bright star of a child vampire had somehow managed to worm her way into his heart without his even realizing that he _had_ one for someone to wend their way inside.

He wanted to turn her face up and kiss away her tears, promising her whatever she needed just to ensure that a smile would light her face up as it always did. When he was at his weakest, his darkest, he could envision her in his mind’s eye and it was that smile that undid him completely.

She was the light to his shadow and the knowledge that something so untoward had happened in her life, something so awful that she was sobbing in his arms – someone who had tried to kill her twice, who had tried to kill her friends untold times, who had promised to love her for centuries – was enough to make him swear right then and there to keep her safe and protected now instead of when she was ready for him.

Holding him felt good, she realized. It wasn’t simply that he was running his fingers through her hair and murmuring nonsense sounds that definitely comforted her. It was the knowledge that someone was willing to let _her_ grieve as much as she needed to. It was the feeling of being secure for once after weeks of feeling like her entire world had been left in ruins.

He couldn’t tell what was the most surprising about this moment: the idea that he wanted to be a good man for her or by the strength in her arms as she clutched at him. She spent herself in tears, weeping into his chest as he held her. As her tears slowed, he lowered her to the floor of the art studio, pulling her into his lap as she lay with her cheek pressed into the wet spot on his shirt. She sniffled a little and then the few straggler tears stopped.

They sat together on the floor for an eternity, for minutes. Time always had a strange way of lasting in a dichotomous blend of forever and too soon. When they had made love together in the woods, it had passed by in the blink of an eye while simultaneously, it had felt like centuries as he worshipped every sun kissed inch of her body in every way he knew how to.

When he was sure that her tears were satiated, that they had finally stopped, he pressed his cheek against her sweet head. “Tell me,” he murmured to her.

Caroline pulled her face back until she was looking up at him. Her cheeks were still marked with the tracks of her tears and her storm-tossed sea eyes were still just as stormy as they had been before she had begun to cry. His thumb caressed the pattern of her tears away from her cheeks.

She opened her mouth and everything poured out in a hot rush. She told him about the Other Side, about Bonnie, and about Damon. She told him about the Travelers and Markos and Tyler. She whimpered as she recounted the injuries to her mother, which Liz had somehow managed to survive, most likely because of Damon. She told him about how she couldn’t go back home again, about how both Stefan had run off without even a good-bye to her, how Elena refused to grieve for Damon. Everything came out until she was spent.

Exhausted at the whisper of how things had gone so terribly wrong in Mystic Falls, for the life she had dreamed for herself, she rested her head against him again. His arms holding her were like two pillars, holding her grounded to the world. She wanted to give up, she realized. She wanted to just give up. “Everything is wrong and horrible, Klaus,” she murmured her final soliloquy. “I’m so tired.”

“It sounds like you’re giving up, Caroline,” Klaus said, his voice thoughtful as he pinpointed the exact thought she had been having. She pulled back to look at him curiously. “I never thought I would see the day where Miss Mystic Falls could actually give up on hope.”

She knew he was teasing her, hoping to see a smile or a spark of her old fire. But she couldn’t bring herself to feel hope, to feel like there was a reason to get up in the morning. “It’s so hard,” she murmured and buried her face against his chest. Her voice was muffled as she continued to speak. “It’s like we’ve been living in this dark, storm tossed sea. It’s like we have known this darkness for so long that the mere idea that the sun might shine again is a pipe dream.” He could hear the exhaustion in her voice, feeling it coming off of her in waves.

Klaus had never been one for advice like what she was seeking. He didn’t know how to relight the fire in her eyes. When things went wrong, he usually just killed whatever needed killing. His methods may have often been denigrated, been spoken down to, and caused untold issues for him in other arenas, but it got the job done.

He realized then that she needed to rest and in some way, she had come to him for it. She had been going forward, breaking down under the pressure of trying to keep the familial bond of her friends as together as was possible in the face of such tragedy. She needed a place where she could feel safe, where she could recharge like a cell phone battery.

“You should sleep,” he suggested. Was he telling her to go to sleep just to keep her with him for a little longer? Or was he telling her because he truly wanted her to rest? Was his advice because he was being selfish or because he was hoping it was exactly what she needed? He couldn’t decide what had made him say it. “You can stay here for a little while, but afterward...” He trailed off, grimacing into her blonde tresses.

The idea of her having to leave so soon after seeking him out was a pain he hadn’t anticipated, worse even than the weakness caused by the rings, almost as bad as the loss of his daughter. How was it she still managed to twist him like this even after the silence that had gone between them since they had last seen one another?

He could admit to himself that he wanted her to stay, preferable indefinitely.

She pulled back from him and looked up into his eyes. He was pierced like a warrior by a blade, stolen by those eyes yet again. He could see the hopelessness and the tiredness; he could see that she wanted to stay with him too.

He couldn’t let her. He and his family all had parts to play; if she showed her face around here, she would only make herself a target for his enemies. And if he stayed, he knew that the façade his family was showing the world would slip as that elusive happiness he always desired most began to manifest in her presence.

“What’s going on here?” She asked him, a flicker of her normal passion in her eyes. He opened his mouth and then closed it. He realized that he wanted to tell her, to share with him what had happened the last few months. He wanted to tell her about his daughter, about the wolves, about the rings. He was surprised. He cared about her, but he wasn’t normally for sharing all of his secrets with just one person. But he found himself desperately wanting to take this beautiful, spell-weaving blonde into his confidence. “Why do you keep telling me that I have to go?”

“Things in the city are… unsettled,” he said finally. “There’s no way I can guarantee your safety right now.”

She looked at him in surprise. She had expected many things from him, but the idea that he couldn’t keep her safe? The idea was laughable. “Yeah, okay,” she said in disbelief. She started to pull away from him, feeling angry with herself. She had trusted him with her own darkness, her own secrets, and he was still keeping his own. She had foolishly talked herself into this little adventure and now she was being sent back on her way.

“I’ll leave, fine,” she said her voice terse. She had no idea how she was going to get the hell out of his horrible, nasty little state with its stupid werewolves and its back roads with no assistance and its stupid beautiful bayous, but if he wanted her to go then she was going to go. She continued to try to pull away from his arms, but he wasn’t letting her go. She glowered up at him. “Let me go, Klaus,” she said firmly. “You want me to leave, so I’ll leave.”

“Caroline…” he trailed off, as though whatever he wanted to say to her was unsayable. He couldn’t bring himself to voice what was going through his head, what had happened. He couldn’t bring himself to let her go either. Instead he pulled her back to him, holding her against him as though she were a lifeline.

As she looked into his face, she could see that he was barely keeping it together. Something had clearly happened to him, though she had no idea what it could possibly be. And that something was as painful to him as her own life had become to her. In that moment, she just wanted him to trust her long enough to unburden himself as she had done with him. She wanted nothing from him; she just wanted to be there _for_ him.

“What’s wrong?” she murmured. “What’s happened?”

“It’s better if you don’t know, luv,” he answered. His voice was husky with his desire to tell her the truth. His breath was shaky and he lowered his face until he had his forehead pressed against her temple, his eyes closed. “Things have happened that I cannot even begin to describe. Believe me when I tell you that this place is dangerous for you and that I truly cannot assure your safety.”

He pulled back and brushed her hair back from her face. “If something were to happen to you, Caroline, I don’t know what I would do.”

She laughed. It was brittle, a facsimile of the true joy-filled laugh that was hiding somewhere in her depths. “Do _not_ begin to tell me how much you care about me,” she ordered. “I don’t care about that. I came here hoping to tell you about how bad my life is, how bad things are at home. I just wanted someone to talk _to_ , someone who hadn’t been there, hadn’t lived it. I just needed to _talk_ to someone and I chose you, Klaus. I chose to trust you and you can’t even give me the same courtesy?”

She shook her head and there was a bitterness in her that he disliked greatly. Was it just because of him that bitterness had rooted inside of her? Or was it the loss of the nucleic family that she and the doppelgangers had crafted for themselves in Mystic Falls?

“Don’t talk to me of your concern for me, Niklaus,” and as she said his full name, her voice cold and angry, he felt a pain lance across his heart, “because I don’t want to hear it. All I want to hear from you is why you look so fragile and broken; why you tell me New Orleans, _your city_ , is so dangerous right now. I just want you to tell me whatever it is that’s darkened your spirit.”

He gaped down at her. He couldn’t understand how it was possible that she cared enough about him to want to know what he had gone through. He couldn’t even understand how she could see the pain he was going through. When had this little baby vampire wormed her way so completely into his life that she could see the parts of himself that he kept hidden even from himself?

Before he could stop himself, words began tumbling from his mouth. It came out in fits and starts. He didn’t even know where he started the story. After he had drowned his anger with words about the werewolves who _dared_ to stand up against him, after he had spewed the horror of the coup to her, he felt bared wide open.

He found himself having to go back to a new beginning when he spoke of his daughter for the first time, having to go back and tell her about Hayley. He saw a flash of confusion and then a sort of raw pain in her eyes and then it was gone. He could have imagined it. Whatever he had thought had been there, it was quickly superseded by joy as he spoke of the coming day when his daughter was to come into the world. He could see that _she_ felt how _he_ had felt at the prospect and it fed him in a way that he hadn’t known he needed to be fed.

As Caroline listened quietly, pulling herself off of his lap so that she could coax him to rest with his head pressed against her thigh. He whimpered as he told her about the unending ache of his loss. And for once, the words he voiced were the actual truth, not the fiction that he and his family had put out to keep Hope safe. It came out before he could stop himself: he told her that his sister held his daughter for him and Hayley, that she was caring for his beautiful Hope, his wonderful daughter, and that he didn’t know if he would ever be able to hold her in his arms ever again.

As he spoke, Caroline slid her fingers into his hair. She murmured her own nonsense comforting words, and he was surprised when he felt the first hot spill of tears across his cheeks. His own crying was done in silence. They fell down against her thigh and she welcomed it, happy that he was finally willing to tell her the truth. She pressed her lips behind his ear, hoping to still the pain in his heart, to kiss it all away just as her mother used to do for her when she was a child.

When he finally stopped speaking, she continued to run her fingers through his hair in slow, lazy circles. She murmured consolingly into his ear periodically and rocked him against her. His eyes were closed against the onslaught of what his life had been like for months and she felt a deep ache inside of her for him. She wanted to make him feel better, to give him something to laugh about.

In the ensuing silence, she found herself talking about silly little things. They were foolish and childish moments, memories of better days. She told him about all manner of things that, looking back now years later, were amusing anecdotes. She wanted to share those moments with him in the hopes that they would bring him out of his shell, bring him back to the man she had known and enjoyed verbally sparring with. She could admit it to herself; she wanted to hear him laugh. He had a rich laugh, a beautiful laugh.

Deep inside, she could admit that she shared those childhood learning moments, the ones that her mother could have used to embarrass her in front of Matt or Tyler, with him because she wanted him to know her. She knew he sort of had this image of her in his mind – a bright star or goddess of some sort – and while he knew the woman she was now, he didn’t know her before. She felt that he needed to know the whole of her if he was to keep his promise of centuries to her.

Once he had asked her to get to know the real him, not the persona she assumed him to be. While he seemed to think that she was bigger, grander, stronger than she really was, she hoped that the childhood memories would give him a glimpse of the girl she had once been, the girl who had turned into the woman holding him tightly on the floor of his art studio, her heart tearing apart in shared grief.

When he finally did laugh, she felt a surge of pride. Even if only for a single second, he had forgotten his pain in the face of her stories. She smiled down at him as she traced light zigzag patterns down his back.

They both lapsed into silence then and she couldn’t help but notice that it was a comfortable silence, as though they had spent those centuries together and they need not speak to share themselves with each other. She realized that it was peaceful and quiet; she found that the horrors of the last few months, after the telling of them, didn’t seem so insurmountable.

She hadn’t come up with a plan to find her way out of the darkness and maybe she hadn’t found absolution, either, but clearing her mind of her grief had been as cleansing as she had hoped it would be. She was glad that she had chosen to come, even though her car had broken down and she had been attacked by some wayward werewolf. Even though Klaus had, as he normally did, frustrated and annoyed her. Even with all of those minor things, she knew she had made the right decision.

“Thank you,” she murmured into the silence. Klaus roused himself from his half drowsing state on her thigh, pushing himself up so that he could look into her eyes. As always, the storm tossed seas of her eyes pierced him as thoroughly as any bolt of lightning.

“Whatever for, Caroline?” He asked.

She grinned at him, the bright lit grin that made his heart flutter. “I wasn’t really thinking when I left this morning. I just… I had to go, you know? I got in the car and started driving south. I wasn’t really thinking about coming here, but then it started to make sense. I needed… well, I just needed to talk to someone and you listened.” She shrugged, her cheeks flaming that angelic pink color again.

He reached out and brushed her hair away from her face, fascinated with the silken feel of it between his fingers. “You’re welcome, luv,” he replied. Before he could second guess himself – he didn’t know how things were supposed to work between them now; he had wooed her and they had slept together but that didn’t a relationship make – he leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the mouth. “Come along, sweetheart,” he said, standing up. He held out his hand and pulled her to her feet easily. “Would you care for a tour of the Abattoir before you rest?” He inquired, wrapping her arm around his.

She made a face. “Yes, I would,” she said, “but why do you call it the Abattoir?”


	4. put them both together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Something Caroline had always known about Klaus was that, no matter what he made the world think about him, he was just as human as she was.

Klaus was delighted with every little gasp coming from Caroline. It had been so long since anyone had been seemingly pleased with anything that was related to him, even if it was something as simple as a walk through his home. With every new dawn, there was some crisis, some horrifying decision that he would necessarily have to make that would undoubtedly cause someone to be hurt by his actions, to grow angry with his methods enough to try and kill him. This stroll through his home with Caroline, simple though it was, was like a boon, a life saver when he needed it most.

As they walked, she told him about her adventures in the bayou. He stopped just outside of Hayley’s room and pulled out his cell phone, texting his brother instructions to bring her car to the city and have it looked at. “Your car should be in perfect working condition by the morning,” he assured her as his brother sent a message back acknowledging the request. When Elijah texted back again, asking whose car he was seeing to, Klaus ignored the question and slid his phone back in his pocket.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Caroline scolded him as she peeked into the open door beside her. “I could have called a tow truck myself.” She paused before adding, “As long as you let me borrow your phone.” She looked back over her shoulder at him and he was smirking at her.

“It’s the least I could do, sweetheart,” he replied. She rolled her eyes, reminding herself that this was the sort of thing that Klaus just _did_.

“Whose room is this?” she inquired as she peered through the door and saw what looked suspiciously like a crib from the corner of her eye.

Instead of waiting for his response, she stepped forward and confirmed her suspicions. This room had clearly been Hayley’s though it didn’t look like it had been used recently. In the corner of the room was Hope’s crib, gathering dust as it waited for an occupant who may never fill it. She pushed her way further into the room and towards the crib, looking at the bedding, the prisms in a mobile pattern above it, and the blanket and teddy bear, sitting idly on the rocking chair.

She had understood what Klaus had said, of course; that he had been expecting a child with Hayley, of _all_ people. But seeing the empty crib seemed to finally let the point sink home. He had slept with this woman and somehow, out of all of it, he had managed to have a child with her.

Caroline was adult enough to admit that what she felt was a mixture of jealousy and happiness. It was one of those odd emotional mixes that made it confusing on top of everything else, heightened as they were by the vampirism. She wasn’t sure if her jealousy stemmed from the fact that the mother of Klaus’s child was Hayley, that neck breaking slut, or if there was a secret part of herself that would have jumped at the chance to play mother to his child.

She knew she couldn’t have kids; she had accepted it.

She would never know what it was like to be a mom unless she adopted. Maybe one day, when she was settled and knew what she really wanted out of life, she would go that route. But sometimes, in the dead of night, she felt like her entire life had been ripped away from her when Katherine had killed her while Damon’s blood was in her system. So many things that she hadn’t considered as a high school student, like the possibility of having her own kid, were impossible now.

She looked back at Klaus from the nursery and saw that he was standing in the hallway, his head bowed as he waited for her. It was almost as if just the sight of the room his daughter would have lived in was too painful to him. Her heart broke at the forlorn look that passed across his face as he looked up, his eyes being pulled to the empty crib.

She hurried back to his side, pulling the bedroom door shut with finality. When he looked up, their eyes met and she offered him a small smile. “Lead on,” she said with a grand gesture down the hallway that had him smiling that smirk that sent shivers racing up and down her spine.

As they continued to walk, Klaus studied Caroline from the corner of his eyes. He couldn’t help but note that her very presence was like a salve on his soul. For so long, he had felt as though the world was, as Caroline had described her own world to him, nothing but darkness. And now this blonde nymph had managed to assuage much of that simply by being who she was. She had a power to her that was both enchanting and addictive. The more he was in her presence, the more he wanted her.

She stopped to admire one of his art pieces that Rebekah had decided to hang upon the wall. It was a single horse in full gallop across a bright green field filled with white flowers. He had once told her the story of his favorite horse, the horse that his father had once killed instead of himself. “It’s almost like you can feel its pleasure,” Caroline marveled.

“What do you mean?”

She gestured to the muscles bunched in mid-gallop. “Can’t you see it?” She asked him. “It’s like you captured the joy this horse has in being _free_.” She nodded thoughtfully and looked at him. “That’s what it is. It’s freedom. That’s what you were aiming for, wasn’t it?”

Klaus offered her that characteristic half-smile again and she felt a thrill of delight whirl its way into her belly. That smirk of his could set her on fire. “Don’t you find it interesting, sweetheart, that you have always managed to understand what I was aiming for when it comes to my art?” He mused. “Even with the snowflake, you seemed to be able to feel exactly what I was hoping to convey.”

“Well, I’m not completely uncultured,” she joked. “I did take an art class or two.” Klaus laughed, a deep throated laugh. His eyes were sparkling when their eyes met again and she smiled, too, glad to hear him sounding, if not completely back to himself, then as close as she could bring him. She turned away from the painting and slid both of her arms around his, leaning into his shoulder comfortably.

As foolish as her decision to come to New Orleans had once seemed, she realized that she had made the best choice. Klaus had a way about him that made her feel as though she were wanted and understood. She knew that he loved her in his own way – she had even accused him of it once when he refused to heal her from his own poisonous bite. She wasn’t sure if what she felt for him was love, per se, but she felt a close connection with him nonetheless.

On her way down south, a Justin Timberlake song had come on the radio that she loved. She had sung along with it and as they walked down the hallway amid peace-filled silence, she couldn’t help but think that it was an excellent analogy for her own relationship with Klaus. Things weren’t always good between them and she had a tendency to be judgmental towards him – a byproduct, of course, all of the things he had once tried to do to her and her friends for his own personal gain – but he reflected her in a way that she needed to see.

She wondered if he thought the same thing.

They came to a stop outside of another door that was wide open. The bed was messy, but the room was tasteful as only those with money could afford. More of Klaus’s artwork littered the walls, both hung and leaning back against the wall as though they hadn’t made the cut to be put up on display. She stepped inside and began perusing the pieces that hadn’t been selected, wondering what further insights she could find by looking at Klaus’s soul in art form.

She found a small canvas tucked behind a large one depicting a running river. Kneeling down, she pulled it free from the stack and she realized that she was looking at something he had done of his daughter. Hope was sleeping peacefully, swaddled in a frilly pink blanket. Her face was relaxed in that innocent sleep that only a content baby could convey. Caroline could feel her heart pounding in her throat as she stared down at the reminder of the child he had lost.

She could feel him standing above her. When he spoke, his voice was soft. “I dream about her all the time,” he said. “And I’m holding her in my arms. She’s always sleeping peacefully, happy and content as babies can be.” When she looked up at him, she could see the flashes of pain in his eyes and she could see that the decision to send his daughter away would most likely always hurt him, even if he got her back.

Klaus may not have been synonymous with a conscience and Caroline knew that the image of Klaus feeling guilt or pain over one of his decisions was incongruous. But it was clear that, as much as he may have hidden it from his siblings or maybe even the two-faced slut that was his daughter’s mother, he was hurting.

She was thrown back to that moment when, dying in front of him on the couch in Elena’s living room, she had accused him of being human. She had been desperate, hoping to sway him to save her life when he had just been so damn stubborn about it. Whether it was her words that swayed him or the knowledge that he had condemned her to death at his own hands, he had saved her life.

Klaus wasn’t irredeemable she realized. She had known that back then and she knew that when they had slept together in the woods. Seeing his sorrow at the loss of Hope only solidified what she had already known.

She lifted herself up, the intent to wrap her arms around him and hold him, just as they had done earlier. But somehow she mistimed it, or maybe her traitorous body had its own designs. Somehow instead of hugging him to her, she managed to kiss him. Her lips brushed against his and for a moment, she was back in the woods, pressed against a tree as he kissed her like a starving man.

It was all the opening that Klaus needed. As she pulled back, her cheeks that darling shade of pink that so amused and delighted him, he grasped her face in his hands and his mouth was on hers. He felt as though he had never tasted anything so sweet, so tender as her tongue. It warred against his and he thought for a moment that he would die if he could not have her. His heart would wrench itself from his chest, ripped apart from its chamber of its own accord, if he could not possess her for a single moment.

He was thrilled that she was responding to him. He felt a power course through his veins unlike anything he had ever known. He had taken thousands of lovers over the millennia of his life. He had known any number of women, both those known to the history books and those whose names had long since faded to time. But it was the love and passion, the kindness and tenderness of this one woman who fed him in a way that the blood and sex of those thousands of women could never add up to.

He pulled back from her breathless, craving more. She turned her face away from his, her eyes closed. He felt like his life preserver had been taken away and he wanted nothing more than to take her then and there, taking his time to savor the moment and her body. When she looked into his eyes then, he felt like his soul was naked and bared to her. She could see him for who he truly was and he wanted to be the person she saw him as.

He had sworn to her that he would wait for her and that much was still true. Nothing in that arena had changed; he knew that she still wasn’t ready to give in to all he had to offer her. This moment in time was a sort of pause on the record of however long it would take for her to come back to him.

He couldn’t invite her to stay here as much as he wanted to anyway. And he knew, without having to ask, that she would refuse him if he were to make the offer, knowing that with things so uncertain in the city that she wouldn’t do anything that could jeopardize him getting his daughter back.

Maybe it was her noble nature that spoke to him. She had a habit of sacrificing herself for others. She had the sort of heart that would give and never ask for anything in return. She made him want to be the man in her eyes, the man who was better than the monster he truly was.

Before he knew it, his hands were fisting in her hair and his lips were on hers again. She responded and he felt a powerful need for this cherub. As they kissed, their tongues warring against each other, she wrapped her arms around his neck and jumped up to envelop her thighs around his hips. He groaned into her open mouth and began moving as a blind man towards his bed.

Caroline rubbed against him as he pressed her back against his bed, his fist above her head to keep his weight off of her so that he could look down at her. She peered up at him with sensual eyes, feeling the spark between the two of them just as she had that day back in the woods. Somehow or another, this damn Original had wormed his way past whatever defenses she had put up, had managed to whoosh in like some predator and she was powerless to fight back.

She could admit that maybe she was a fool. She could admit that this was probably yet another mistake in a long line of mistakes that she had made when it came to Klaus. But in that moment, as his hands seemed to multiply from two to six in his need to explore every inch of her body, and as she found herself reacting with gasps and moans, she didn’t care. Just like back in the woods, just like every heartfelt press of his lips against her cheek, she was sucked in so completely that she didn’t care anymore.

Klaus filled a part of herself that she never knew she needed filled. Maybe he was right and it was her light being drawn to his dark. Or maybe it was because she knew that he was a better man than he let on to everyone else, that he wasn’t the bastard he portrayed to the world at large. Even with all of the things he had done to her and her friends, in those moments when it was just the two of them, he had shown himself to be a far better person than she had ever dreamed possible.

Somewhere deep inside Klaus-the-Monstrous-Hybrid was the shy, genteel Klaus-the-Man. And maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but Caroline was positive that she would one day fall in love with both.


	5. you have few choices

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Elijah has always been a bit of a killjoy.

As Caroline slept peacefully beside him, Klaus sketched her in faded sepia tones. She was always beautiful to him, of course, but he seemed to prefer simplistic colors and shading whenever he was drawing her. He had stacks of sketch books dedicated to the subject matter that was Caroline. He had drawn her angry, happy, crying, grateful, on the verge of ecstasy, and every emotion in between.

Caroline was beautiful beyond measure and every time he tried to capture that beauty, he felt like he had somehow failed.

No doubt, Cami would have told him that he was obsessed if she had seen the notebooks filled with pages of his beloved Caroline. But sometimes he strongly believed that was what love was partially about; a need to fill the waking spaces of horror and mayhem with whatever beauty was available even if it was only a memory. Maybe imaginary Cami was right; maybe he was obsessed.

As he finished the outline of her beautiful back, he set the sketchbook down so that he could watch her. A part of him wanted to wake her up, to speak with her again, to hold her in his arms and to make love until the sun rose. He knew that their time together was only for tonight, just as she surely knew that. He didn’t want to waste whatever time they had left together sleeping.

But he also recognized that she had been through hell since last he had seen her. Her home had been ripped away from her, the very place he had once made fun of her for her refusing to leave. The Bennett witch had died, leaving a gaping wound in Caroline’s heart just as surely as the loss of Mystic Falls did. She needed to rest, to recoup her strength to enter the next phase of her life whatever that phase would be.

He knew that it would most likely be just as difficult as the last patch. He could only hope that her life was sweetness and sunshine, things that she truly deserved, but he knew better. Hope was enough for maybe a day, maybe three, but when you had seen ten thousand days, hope was almost a letdown in the face of reality.

The world for every single vampire was comprised by loss in the millions. Not only were they predators, bred for the purpose of injury and killing, but the world passed them by while they were still within it; vampires, by their very nature, embodied the concept of changelessness. How many people had he, himself, seen die while he remained eternally the same?

Caroline was only just beginning to see what time was for a vampire. He had told her once that she had to stretch her thinking about that concept as she was still stuck in a very human concept of it. It was like each vampire was an island of timelessness while the world and the humans they befriended, they loved, and they hated passed them by.

One day, Caroline would no doubt understand all of this.

Maybe it would be when her mother inevitably died, when that final link to a home she had loved and lost was truly behind her. The loss of her mother would most likely be one of the most catastrophic events in her life – Klaus could admit that his heart already ached at the thought, knowing what the inevitable change would no doubt do to his beloved’s heart – and it would either destroy the woman he loved or it would turn her into an even better vampire than she already was.

And there was truly no doubt that Caroline was a perfect vampire in her own way. She may have believed strongly against just killing anyone for whatever reason, but even she had to admit that she made an excellent predator.

In the distance, he heard his brother’s careful tread entering the main floor of their home. Tucking a blanket up and over Caroline’s bare shoulder, he was across the room before Elijah had made it to the dining room.

He shut his bedroom door behind him quietly, hoping that Caroline slept through whatever this meeting with his brother would no doubt entail. Klaus was under no delusions that Elijah would be put off from his questions about the small car with Virginia plates that Klaus had asked him to fetch.

As Klaus and Elijah met in the dining room, Elijah immediately went over to a crystal decanter. He studied the amber contents within before pouring both himself and his brother a drink. Turning around with the glass in offering to his brother, Elijah shot him his most sarcastic smile. “Tell me, Niklaus,” Elijah said as Klaus took the proffered glass warily. “Why was there a Ford Fiesta with Virginia plates on Route 90 this evening?”

“I can hardly answer for all of the tourists that deviate from the major highways in their itinerary, Elijah,” Klaus quipped.

“Really, brother,” Elijah replied, rolling his eyes at his brother’s response.

At this point in their lives, Elijah was more than used to Klaus’s need for witty banter though he had not grown any fonder of the practice than he had been when they still lived. It was only a step up from the ridiculous repartee that Kol most often brought into conversations, but not by much. Elijah could at least admit that it was leaps and bounds above Finn’s boorish attempts at humor.

Klaus sighed before gulping down the bourbon. He set the glass down beside the decanter. Quite helpfully, Elijah refilled it without asking as he slowly slipped his own drink. Elijah was studying him like he were a newly discovered species. “I had a visitor this evening,” Klaus finally said. “You need not worry; she’ll be going in the morning so long as you were able to ensure her vehicle is repaired…?”

“Honestly, Niklaus,” Elijah snapped, slamming his glass down in his irritation. He knew that his brother was chomping at the bit, demanding to taste blood, but they weren’t _ready_ yet. And of course, his brother went and did something completely airheaded and foolish _as usual_. He could only wonder which of the Mystic Falls _children_ he had somehow managed to invite here for whatever new game he was playing. “We must keep up appearances _for your daughter_ ,” he stressed.

The look in Klaus’s eyes hardened while he seriously contemplated what it would be like to dagger his brother. He hadn’t done so since he had given his brother over to Marcel and Davina, but he had his limits. He could understand why Elijah seemed to immediately assume he was putting everything they had planned in jeopardy, but Klaus was sick and tired of Elijah thinking merely that as the older brother, he was the smartest and most capable.

Klaus loved his daughter, too, but it was sometimes as if Elijah forgot this fact. Or maybe he just didn’t believe that Klaus was able to love his daughter.

“It was hardly as if I planned to have a visitor, Elijah,” Klaus said through clenched teeth. “If I had known that she was on her way down here, I would have told her to turn around.” Elijah picked his glass back up and swallowed back his bourbon quickly before pouring himself another glass. “Have you kept up on current events in Mystic Falls?” Klaus asked into the silence.

“No; why would I?” Elijah asked.

Klaus took the crystal cut decanter into his hands, studying the amber fluid within before joining his brother for another drink. “It seemed that the town is off-limits to everyone in the supernatural community. It seemed to have taken its toll on the doppelganger and her friends.” He took an appreciative drink before adding, “And it appears that the ripple through the Other Side the witches were on about recently was directly related to the goings on in Mystic Falls.

“Perhaps we should be keeping a closer watch on things up there, hm?” He asked.

Elijah gaped at Klaus, trying to wrap his head around what he was being told. He couldn’t even begin to understand how an entire city was suddenly off-limits to the supernatural, never mind how Elena and her friends had managed to destroy the Other Side.

According to what Marcel had said, who had learned from Davina of its destruction, the Other Side had been steadily declining before it had disappeared altogether. No doubt that had something to do with the Bennett witch, who was far more powerful than she should have rightfully been.

“Does this have anything to do with Silas?” Elijah inquired with a touch of uneasiness. The first immortal had managed to ensnare his own brother in his machinations, getting into his head and causing no end of trouble. The idea that Silas may still be around, causing trouble, was enough to make Elijah want to take his family and run for the hills, New Orleans and home be damned.

Klaus offered a one-armed shrug. “I honestly couldn’t say. Caroline didn’t mention him in her recital of how everything has gone straight to hell since we left.” Elijah was intrigued by the mention of Caroline. He had known that his brother seemed to be greatly affectionate towards her, but he had assumed that her hostility remained a barrier to whatever plans his brother had for her.

“A little ironic that we are not the cause of the hell that Mystic Falls has turned into, no?” Klaus joked.

“Indeed, brother,” Elijah said, distracted by the idea of Klaus loving the blonde-haired baby vampire.

To be honest, Elijah honestly thought that his brother was more than likely someone who was incapable of honest emotions, much less love. It was partially why his constant need to redeem his brother seemed to be on par with Sisyphus and his boulder. And yet, the way that Klaus said her name spoke of something a bit deeper than mere affection.

If Elijah wasn’t so worried about what would happen if the werewolves or witches found out a new baby vampire was in the Quarter, he may have taken more time to explore this phenomena.

“Niklaus, she cannot stay here,” Elijah said firmly, hoping he wasn’t telling his brother anything he didn’t already know. Klaus may have indicated that she would be well on her way just a moment ago, but Elijah could hardly believe that Klaus would willingly to do what was necessary. He wasn’t always able to be logical about something at the best of times; their current circumstances were hardly ideal for Klaus to remain logical.

Klaus snarled at his brother, hating to hear exactly what he already knew, what he had already said.

He wanted Caroline to stay, though he knew that it was asking for too much for the world, his siblings, or nature itself to allow him more than a short few moments of happiness. He was practically demanding that fate step in and screw something up by the sheer audacity of the idea that he, the damned, the bastard, could possibly have something that made him deliriously and endlessly happy or that he wanted to keep it at all costs.

“I am fully aware of that, Elijah,” Klaus snapped. “As I said, I know that she must be gone in the morning. So to that end, were you able to have someone take a look at her vehicle and ensure that it will be useable come morning?”

Elijah sighed in relief. “Yes, brother,” Elijah replied. “I’m not sure what may have happened to Miss Forbes’ car before she met up with you, but it was working just fine, or so I was assured. It’s parked in a public lot at the edge of the Quarter and ready for her.” With that, Elijah pulled her car keys out of his coat pocket and dropped them onto the table separating him and his brother.

“Thank you,” Klaus said through clenched teeth and turned his back on his brother.

He wanted to strangle his brother, truly. He knew what needed to be done, just as he knew that he could not assure Caroline of her safety in this newly begotten hellhole in the center of the Quarter. It galled him that he couldn’t keep her safe, just as it galled him that he couldn’t keep his daughter safe. It angered him that his brother would assume that he would lose sight of the end game, the need to bring his daughter home, in the face of Caroline’s arrival.

He could admit to himself that it was intoxicating to have her under his roof, to have known her touch and passion again. He wanted to keep her with him, to lose himself in her eyes, in her touch, and in her love. But he also knew that as much as he would have wanted all of that, even if he had decided to damn the consequences, she wouldn’t go for it.

He had made it clear what he would be losing if she stayed and she wouldn’t let him sacrifice his family for her. He knew that; she knew that. Elijah didn’t know Caroline so well, which is why he worried that Klaus would do something to ruin the plan or that Caroline may do something to ruin it. It didn’t excuse Elijah from making it seem as though Klaus was an idiot, but he could at least understand that his brother didn’t know any better.

As he let himself back into his room, seeing her still sleeping peacefully in his bed was a moment he wanted to etch into his brain. Instead of the pain-filled memories of giving up his daughter or feeling the weakness caused by the moonlight rings, he wanted to carve this image over them both. Her smooth back reflecting the soft light from his table lamp, her blond strands of hair streaming back across his pillows.

What had he once promised her? A whole beautiful world and here, he had found yet another piece of beauty to add to the list that he wanted to show her.

If only he could get the lighting just right.


	6. addicted to the fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caroline comes to some pretty drastic conclusions about what happens come morning.

Caroline could admit that Klaus had excellent taste in sheets. She was a bit of a snob when it came to sheets herself. It was 600 thread count or higher in her room; nothing less would do. Tyler, the barbarian, would put just _anything_ on his bed and she had hated to spend the night when they were together. I mean, who the hell just grabs whatever sheets available and tosses them on their bed? Don’t they realize that they have to actually _sleep_ on those pieces of crap?

Her favorite pair of sheets, happily ensconced in her mother’s house and being completely useless to her, had a thread count of over a 1000. She often felt like she was sliding on her sheets and it was one of the most delightful feelings as far as she was concerned. She had debated taking them with her to Whitmore but had decided against it, leaving them as a decadent treat for when she went home for the weekend.

She had obviously made a mistake on that one and seriously considered having her mother deliver the lovely things to her when she got back.

She had no idea what the thread count was of Klaus’s sheets, but they were soft and comfortable in a way that even the highest thread counts sheets of hers couldn’t compare to. Of course, she could also admit that it was possible she felt that way because the sheets smelled of his musk, making her feel safe and comforted. Or maybe it was the knowledge that they had spent a delightfully luxurious few hours, exploring one another thoroughly and completely.

She could admit that a good orgasm always kind of made her feel pretty damn relaxed, too.

As Caroline slowly came to, thinking about how wonderful his sheets were, she realized that _he_ was no longer lying behind her, or sitting more like. The last thing she remembered was him leaning back against the headboard, looking over at her as she smiled up at him like a love drunk idiot. Maybe she had scared him off with her totally suave and not-at-all-like-a-hopeless-teenager attitude.

But she didn’t think that was really what had happened. As she went through her muddled thoughts about sheets and thread counts, she could vaguely remember hearing the door shutting quietly as though he had slipped out. She opened her eyes against the soft yellow light of the table lamp and confirmed her suspicions: he had snuck out at some point.

If she had been more comfortable in her own skin or more comfortable in Klaus’s house, she would have gotten up to look for him. Instead, she lay flat against the bed and looked up at his ceiling, trying to carefully tease out her feelings on what had occurred between them.

The glaring obvious one was that sort of guilt thing cropping back up again.

She could admit that as much as she and Klaus kind of made a certain kind of sense, no one at home would agree. Bonnie had disavowed her exceedingly brief love affair with Klaus the last time she had slept with him. Tyler had lost it completely and she supposed that she couldn’t really blame him. She was pretty sure that even Elena would have judged her harshly if she hadn’t been Katherine at the time.

The only person who didn’t seem to care one way or the other had been Stefan and well, it wasn’t like he would find out about this little interlude anyway. He was too busy being off and ignoring her calls, trying to find a way to bring Bonnie and Damon back from the dead (again).

The little pinpricks of guilt began to grow as she dwelled on it. She reminded herself that she had _needed_ this. Maybe not the sex part – though she could admit yet again that there was something incredibly relaxing about the whole escapade – but she had definitely needed to get the hell out of Dodge. Home had been ripped away from her; her friends were all pod people or dead. She had needed someone and the only person who could have understood her predicament was Klaus.

How many mornings had she woken up, wondering why she didn’t just take off her daylight ring? The loss of her home had been hard to bare; her best friend’s destruction along with the Other Side had been a weight on her chest that had practically suffocated her. Losing first Stefan and then Elena within the same week had been nails on the coffin.

Caroline wasn’t known for suicidal ideation; she was peppy and cheerful. Depression was one of those fickle little bitches that snuck out of the dark like a werewolf hunting you and then chomping down, infesting you with its venom. She had been bitten and just like werewolf venom, Klaus had the cure to hand. Instead of his blood, it had been his ability to take all the darkness she felt inside and understand it and not judge her for it.

Too often, the pedestal of light and cheer that her friends had her on was too damn high. Sometimes, she thought she would suffocate from the height. She hadn’t yet, but it was only a matter of time before it came crashing down around here and killed her, as well as her friendships, in the process. She couldn’t be Miss Fucking Cheerful all the damn time. Sometimes, she needed to give in to the darkness inside and just cry it the hell out.

Klaus had offered her that. After they had slept together, she had told him about her guilt and anger, her depression and fears. He had listened in a completely nonjudgmental way, which wouldn’t have been the case with any of her friends except for maybe Stefan if he was still around, the jerk. Klaus had told her that sometimes the brightest flames are nearly snuffed out by the darkness, but bounce back twice as strong.

Those were things that her friends wouldn’t have been able to say, being unaffiliated with the darkness like Klaus was. Maybe they would have said something similar if they were around or weren’t acting weird, but it had been the way that Klaus had phrased it that had seemed to make the ache in her heart slow down and finally abate.

As she continued to remind herself that sometimes, Klaus just knew exactly what she needed to hear, the guilt began to shut up. It was like tracing all of the reasons why this had been precisely what she needed at this moment in her life was what she needed to assuage the little voice in her head that kept telling her she was a very horrible person.

She _wasn’t_ a horrible person. She was a good person with good reasons and sometimes, that meant that you maybe went for the bad boy.

Maybe she had a fix-the-bad-boy complex like so many heroines in the movies did.

To be fair, Klaus wasn’t really a bad boy at all though. He was more like a product of his parents’ making. She didn’t know all of what had happened in his youth, but she had very little doubt that Esther’s and Mikael’s constant attempts to kill him, and by extension his siblings, or his siblings and by extension him – whichever way it went – had really shaped him into the monster everyone loved to hate. She could admit that Klaus, more than likely, wasn’t as evil as all of that.

People just got so hung up on the image that they couldn’t see the forest through the trees, she mused. Tyler, Elena, Bonnie, Jeremy, even herself at some points had failed to take into consideration that monsters of Klaus’s caliber were rarely born that way, but most often made.  

But just as she had told him back in the Gilberts’ living room, he was clearly not irredeemable. The pain she saw in his eyes whenever he brought up Hope was proof enough for her. He had very much loved his little girl and was heartbroken, not only for himself but for his brother and Hayley too, that she was not able to grow up with them.

Caroline wasn’t sure if it was New Orleans that had changed Klaus, her pep talk about his humanity, or something/-one else that had wrought the change in him. Most likely, it was a combination of all of that and the birth of his daughter, the fight he had put up to bring her into this world instead of being sacrificed to the witches as they had wanted, that had wrought the change.

Only time would really tell if Klaus would keep it up.

She pushed herself up and swathed herself in the sheets, looking around the room thoughtfully. She could, in truth, get used to this. She could definitely enjoy watching Klaus turn into the man she knew he could be. She could definitely help with a good rallying cry to get back at the wolves that had stolen his strength, at the witches for daring to try and take his baby girl, and do everything she could to help bring Hope home.

The desire to run off and far away from Mystic Falls was almost painful in its intensity. She curled around herself, surprised by how much she suddenly didn’t _want_ to go home. Caroline Forbes wasn’t one to run away from her problems or her responsibilities – maybe just take a few days or weeks to get her head on straight, but leaving was never a permanent solution.

As she thought about staying, it became crystal clear that she absolutely couldn’t stay. It wasn’t just that something was clearly wrong with Elena and she had to figure it out. It wasn’t just the need to find a way back home to Mystic Falls. It wasn’t just that she had to find Bonnie and bring her back from whatever place she was in, and she guessed Damon was included in that too. It was only a little bit because she wanted to tell Stefan off to his face when he finally did come strolling back home.

If she stayed, then there was no telling how things would go for Klaus or the NOLA vampires. Things were tense enough as it was. Never mind the fact that her very presence could cause some form of retaliation from the wolves with the moonlight rings to spill over onto the Mikaelsons or their vampires in some way, but she knew that Klaus was having a hard enough time playing the part of the grieving father.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t grieving; it was that he was better at showing his grief in acts of vengeance, usually something pretty bloody and painful. He clearly still cared about her, if her ending up in his room and in his bed had any indication whatsoever. It was possible that while he and Hayley were playing the part of the grieving parents that he would slip with her hiding away in the Abattoir, cheering him up when no one was looking…

…if she stayed in the Abattoir.

She could probably live with this Marcel person and his baby vampires, if the need arose. Or bunk with one of them until she found a place that would work for her. She could transfer to Tulane and live on campus. But then again, she would have to wait until the cover of darkness, hope that the damn wolves who had taken the Quarter didn’t see or sense her, or that no one would tell them, and…

Then what?

She could handle subterfuge and covert missions – she had after all managed to distract Klaus a number of times for her friends – but she didn’t think she could handle it indefinitely. And from what Klaus had said when they had been in the art studio, there was no telling _when_ they would finally be able to act against this rogue wolf pack.

As she realized that at the end of the day that no matter how much she may fantasize about the idea, she couldn’t stay, it occurred to her that she shouldn’t even _remember_ _this_.

She sat up, gasping at the realization that by telling her about his daughter, Klaus had possibly caused an even bigger problem for him and his family to deal with. She understood why he had told her the truth, he after all seemed to trust her in a way that he only reserved for no one really, but it was a problem in every way. If anyone even _thought_ that Hope was alive, and anyone knew who she was to Klaus in any capacity, then it wasn’t much of a stretch that she would know that his daughter was alive.

She swallowed and tried not to have a panic attack about a possible future where she was tortured for the knowledge that his dead daughter wasn’t really dead. She felt sick to her stomach and brought her knees up, clamping her arms around them tightly and willing herself to calm down.

She was safe in Klaus’s room. She wasn’t being tortured. No one knew she was here. She could conceivably go and never look back.

But she knew she wouldn’t let it go that way. And she knew that Klaus wouldn’t take the chance either. She wouldn’t _want_ him to.

Hope was the most important person in his life. She played second fiddle to the child. His siblings did, too. Hayley probably took something like fourth string because, let’s be real here, Klaus couldn’t _possibly_ be sucked in by back-stabbing wolf sluts every damn day. It was pretty obvious that whatever had happened between them to create Hope wasn’t exactly the fairytale love story every girl hoped and dreamed of anyway.

Caroline came to the only logical conclusion: he had to compel her. He had to make her forget everything he had told her and most likely, she would have to forget that she had come down here at all.

She bowed her head and flung herself bodily back onto the bed, burying her face in his pillow. She wouldn’t cry, she assured herself. There was nothing to cry about. It was in his daughter’s best interest and even if she really, really wanted to be selfish, she wouldn’t do that to a helpless infant. Hope didn’t know her and she didn’t know Hope, but she was _not_ going to put an innocent child at risk.

As she fought back the tears that threatened, she heard the door open behind her. She knew it was Klaus – could she really tell his steps from someone else already? – and instead of walking into the room, he stood there for a few moments, as though watching her sleep. Slowly, she pulled herself back from the pillow and let her eyes meet his.

He _was_ studying her, no doubt for some new sketch he had in his mind. She offered him a shy smile, swallowing back the pain of just a few moments before. She sat up slowly, letting the sheets fall into her lap, and reached out her hand. She beckoned him with crooked fingers, knowing that their time was extremely limited.

Even if she couldn’t remember what had gone between them in the morning, even if she would never remember this moment again in her life unless he allowed it, she wanted to give _him_ a good memory to hold onto. She knew he would remember this night, their mingled sorrows and fears and their sex into the late night hours, for an eternity and she would be completely oblivious.

It would no doubt pain him and it would no doubt be yet another heroic thing he did that no one else realized or cared about.


	7. haunted by the ghost of you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Caroline and Klaus come to terms with what they've both been feeling.

Klaus kissed the sweet blonde head resting against his shoulder before he could stop himself. This was what he assumed happiness felt like. He wasn’t completely sure though. He could remember fleeting moments in his past that were most likely happiness. Having lived in and with his darkness for so long, he found it harder and harder to remember what that was like anymore.

He could get used to this though.

The feeling of her pressed against him, the gentle inhalations and exhalations as she breathed, and the warmth that formed in his chest for Caroline was intoxicating. If this is what Rebekah had felt every time she had seemingly fallen in love and begged him to turn one of her lovers, he could see why she had been so difficult when he told her to end it.

Unlike Rebekah, he was pretty sure he could say farewell to this, but that didn’t mean he wanted to. But to be fair, he wasn’t faced with that decision yet.

As they lay together, his thoughts swirled. He wanted to keep her with him; he wanted to let her go home. Every possible argument was available for a quick perusal both for and against the notion of her staying. He knew what he _should_ do but the idea was galling, much as it no doubt had been for Rebekah whenever he had told her to move on.

Even as he reminded himself of all that was at stake, he still couldn’t shake the idea that he could have his cake and eat it too. He knew it wasn’t actually possible. If he somehow managed to talk Caroline into staying, then something would inevitably go wrong with all of the other plans he and his brother had in motion. Never mind how Elijah would react to it especially after Klaus had assured him that Caroline would be gone come morning.

Still, he couldn’t completely get rid of the idea that maybe, just maybe Caroline could stay and everything would work out. He thought maybe that’s what hope sounded like.

But even as he felt hope surge forth, he was reminded of his daughter Hope. She was everywhere, as she always was. She had been in his life for seconds whereas Caroline had been in his for far longer. And yet, if he had to choose one or the other, he would by necessity choose his daughter over a possible future that was uncertain.

Hope was certainty; Caroline an unknown.

He couldn’t decide what pained him more: the knowledge that he would have to bid her farewell or the knowledge that she couldn’t go back to Mystic Falls with the knowledge that his daughter was alive. He would have to take every moment that they had shared away from her and it saddened him.

Caroline snuggled in closer to Klaus, listening to his heart beat against his chest. It was a steady thump beneath her ear and it called to her. It seemed to speak of contentedness. She could understand that; she was feeling pretty content herself.

Of course, as she lay languidly against him, her thoughts pulled her back to the idea that she couldn’t stay much longer. The sun would be rising soon and if she was really going to be out of New Orleans before anyone realized she was there, then she would have to get up and start the process. She didn’t want to go, though.

She still had a million problems waiting for her to face them when she went back home. She had formed absolutely no plans whatsoever to deal with them. While it was possible that her trip home would be more productive in the plan-making department, she couldn’t be sure that she would have any solid leads on what to do next.

She didn’t run away from her problems and she wasn’t the one to just hide from everything going wrong. She should be in the thick of things, coming up with solutions. But the lure of staying in Klaus’s bed, enveloped in his arms was enough to make her seriously consider it.

She knew she couldn’t stay though. As she lay in the shelter of his arms, she could admit that while the knowledge of what was at stake was a good reason why she shouldn’t stay, it wasn’t the biggest reason at all. She had realized that it was more than likely that she would continue falling in love with Klaus if she were to stay.

Here, in the safety of his arms and in the silence of her own mind, she could admit that it was a slippery slope. When he had moved on from Mystic Falls, a part of her had been thrilled because he would stop wooing her, stop making him seem like the right fit that he so obviously was.

She hadn’t foreseen that her need to get away for a few moments respite in the face of her problems would only solidify the fact that she could and most likely would fall in love with Niklaus Mikaelson one day. If she stayed any longer, that one day would a short trip down the road instead of years.

The idea of falling in love with Klaus Mikaelson wasn’t so different from falling in love with a lit powder keg; there was no telling when it would go off but it absolutely would at some point in future.

It was possible that if she admitted to loving him, then she would lose her friends. If Bonnie ever came home, Caroline couldn’t be sure that she would understand much less maintain their friendship. Matt would be gone and if Elena ever bounced back from whatever oddness she was going through after Damon’s death, Caroline wasn’t so sure that Elena would forgive her either.

Even knowing that she could conceivably lose everyone who claimed to care about her, it wasn’t as scary as she thought it would be. The real fear had less to do with her friends and what they would think. She was far more frightened that, much like his daughter, she would be used as a target against him in some way. She didn’t want to be used against him.

If she was going to love him and be with him, she had to be able to take care of herself. She was still young enough in vampire world that she was next to useless in a real fight. She could admit that much.

Maybe her talks about being in college and having plans that day in the woods had less to do with those plans and more to do with the fact that she needed to do more vampire growing up before she would be comfortable being in a relationship with him. Then again, even if she were a thousand years old, she probably still wouldn’t be able to take the people who would try to her use her against him.

With a sigh, she sat up slowly and looked into his eyes. She didn’t want to do this, but she knew that if she didn’t bring up the inevitable, he would. She felt like it was a cowardly thing to ignore the obvious.

As she looked down at him, she offered him a crooked smile before the enormity of what she needed to say stole the smile from her face. He had an arm folded behind his head as a pillow and his eyes studied the serious expression on her face.

“I guess we should talk about where we go from here,” Caroline ventured shakily. She didn’t want to have this conversation, but she knew she couldn’t stay. She wouldn’t let him lose everything he had been fighting for just because she wanted to put her head in the sand.

As she curled her legs beneath her, holding the sheets against her chest, she couldn’t look away from his eyes. He held them wide and for a moment, he opened his mouth as though to speak before clenching his jaw shut. His eyes were like liquid; soft blue lakes peering back at her. She could see a muscle twitching in his cheek while the seconds ticked forward toward the inevitable.

“You have to go,” he said finally before she could force the words out. She tore her gaze away from his and nodded her agreement. She couldn’t stand to see the look on his face, the look of pain that seemed to tell her that he had hoped she would stay just as much as she wanted to stay.

Klaus felt like he had been punched in the stomach although he had known that this was coming. He had watched the second hand on the clock tick in its unending forward progress. Dawn would be upon them soon; it was now or never time. But he knew, even though his heart was telling him something completely different, that he had to send her away.

And he knew that he could not send her away without compelling her to forget their time together.

In some secret place, he had wanted her to keep the memories. He had a crazed idea that the memories of their time together would somehow bring Caroline closer to admitting that his affections for her were real and true. He wanted her to remember so that when she thought of their night together, she would feel an ache in her heart that only he could assuage. That ache would eventually bring her back to him and sooner than the centuries he had spoken of; maybe only decades, or maybe only months.

Biting her lip, Caroline studied the headboard of his bed before speaking. “I do have to go home, Klaus. I can’t stay here. I can’t… If I stay, I’ll ruin what you and Elijah have planned. I can’t do that to you or to Elijah and especially not to your daughter.” She let out a shaky laugh. “Hell, I can’t do that to Hayley and it’s not like she and I are friends.”

Klaus looked away from the sweet face, away from the pain in her eyes. And he could tell, truly, that she didn’t want to go any more than he wanted to let her go. They could both agree in that moment that she wanted to stay, that she wanted to hold on to him until well past the sunrise, and that he felt the same way. They were in perfect symphony both in what they wanted and what had to happen.

He sighed and tried to figure out how to broach the thing he didn’t want to tell her. A part of him just wanted to compel her to forget, to not even warn her. But he knew that Caroline would be angry with him if he did it, whether her anger was in a few days’ time or in a few years’ time. He couldn’t do that to her.

“And you have to make me forget,” she whispered, staring at the sheet covering her knee. Klaus looked over at her, startled. How could he not have realized that she would already know what needed to be done? He felt a knife twist itself into his heart. “I can’t remember anything and I’m _so sorry_.”

“Why are you sorry, luv?” He asked, not quite sure he understood her.

“It’s not _fair_ that you’ll remember everything we talked about and everything that’s happened between us. And I get to go home, completely unaware. I won’t even remember coming down here to see you,” she muttered, sniffling. “I’m sorry, Klaus. I shouldn’t… I wish I didn’t put you in this position.”

He sat up and pulled her to him, sliding her onto his lap as he held her. She buried her face into his bicep, keeping her face turned away from his probing gaze. He felt the hot spill of a few tears within moments as he stroked her hair. “Caroline, luv,” he murmured into her hair. “Do not speak of fairness or apologize. I have long known that life, no matter how long you’ve lived it, has little to do with fairness. And it’s not your fault, Caroline.”

“I should have left when you told me to,” she whimpered, curling around his arm. “I’ll never remember this and I know it’ll hurt.”

He sighed. “Oh, Caroline. You’re always thinking of other people and never yourself. Couldn’t you be selfish for once in your life?”

She laughed just like he had wanted her to. “I _am_ selfish,” she assured him, sniffling as she pulled away from him. She looked down at him with earnest eyes. “I swear.”

He smiled up at her and brushed her hair from her face again. Overcome with his own pain at what was in front of them now, he kissed her softly. Her lips tasted like the lip gloss she currently favored – mango – and her tongue was as tender as he had rediscovered only a few short hours before. When he pulled back, her cheeks were flushed again.

“Come, sweetheart,” he said softly. He felt like his limbs were made of wood. “We need to get you dressed.”

They dressed in silence, neither one really knowing what to say to the other. They had spent hours together, bliss filled and pure. She had managed to make him forget that he was weakened by the moonlight rings and that he missed his daughter. He had managed to make her forget that she couldn’t go home and all of her friends were missing from her life.

They had given purely and unselfishly to one another. And both of them had quite realized that they needed each other in a way that neither one could put into words even if asked. She needed his darkness; she needed his light. They were opposite sides of the same coin. She made him want to be a better man; he made her want to be a better woman.

When they were both dressed dressed, she watched Klaus watching her. He kept his eyes on her movements, as though trying to memorize these last few moments. Putting on a brave face, she asked, “So what was wrong with my car?”

“Nothing,” Klaus answered with a faint shrug. “Elijah assured me that it was working when he parked it in a public lot for you.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the hallway. “He left your keys on the table out there. I’ll take you to where it’s parked.”

With dread, Caroline followed Klaus down the hallway and into the dining room. He picked up her keys before leading her forward. She kept waffling between moving forward with what they knew had to be done and telling him to stop, to just stop and let her stay. Instead, she looked around at the Abattoir, trying to commit it to memory for no good reason. Soon, she wouldn’t even remember what this place looked like.

Klaus held her hand as they slipped into a silent world. Much like New York, New Orleans was billed as a city that never slept. But as they walked, Caroline found that the witching hour for New Orleans was that hour just before dawn when most of the revelers had fallen asleep or passed out after too much fun.

“This is my favorite time of night to be in the city,” Klaus murmured into the pre-dawn silence. Caroline glanced up at his face as they spoke. “It has put itself to bed after a long, hard night of _laissez les bon temps rouler_. The tourists are all tucked into their beds and the locals, too. If you listen carefully, sometimes it can sound like you can hear their hopes and dreams whistling into the atmosphere for what the next day will bring.”

Caroline smiled, enjoying Klaus in one of his poetic moods.

As they walked, he told her bits and pieces of about his favorite parts of the city. He told her which buildings he favored and why; he described Jackson Square and the madness that it could cause. She could hear the love he had for his home and she was reminded of that message he had left on her voicemail and wanted to experience these things with him so that she could see it firsthand.

He squeezed her hand affectionately as they continued to stroll. Caroline took it all in as best she could, having vamped her way through the Quarter on her way to Klaus. She still didn’t fully understand her need to try and memorize every detail, every word, and every squeeze of his hand. But maybe it was that hope, singing deep within her heart: a hope that she would one day remember all of this again.

Klaus stopped finally beside a public parking lot. In the dimness, she could make out her car parked between a Chevy Charger and a Volkswagen. She swallowed back her sorrow, swallowed back whatever words she wanted to say. Instead she turned and faced Klaus, knowing that even kissing him could have repercussions now that the two of them were out in public.

“Thank you,” she murmured, pitching her voice so that only he could hear her.

“I should thank you, sweet Caroline,” he replied. He looked around the two of them and listened to be sure. The only heart beats in the vicinity were a few streets away and strolling away from them. He slid her face into his hands and kissed her lightly on the lips. She responded with her usual fervor and he wondered if this was what it meant to be one of the damned.

He pulled back and studied her face again. She looked up at him with big, liquid eyes. They were the same storm tossed color they always were, a shade darker in the dimmed lights. With another thought that this was what hell must assuredly be, he caught her gaze.

As he pushed his power into her mind he said, “Caroline, you will not remember coming to New Orleans. You and I did not meet, did not speak. You were not attacked by werewolves.  You do not know what is happening here or what I have been up to since last we spoke. You did not make it to New Orleans.

“You only got as far as route 11 before your car started to have trouble. You pulled over on the side of the road and a very nice motorist was able to help you get your car into proper shape. While the friendly motorist helped you, you realized that you were better off at home instead of driving to see me. You decided to turn around and go home.

“When you get home, you will focus on the problem of getting back into Mystic Falls. You will work with your friend, Alaric, to find a way around the Travelers’ spell to grant you entry back into the home you know and love.”

He felt his heart breaking as she soaked up his words like the sponge he knew she would be. Smiling vacantly in Klaus’s direction. “I didn’t come to New Orleans,” she agreed. “I turned around and went home. I have a plan to work with Alaric to get back into Mystic Falls.”

With that, Caroline turned mechanically towards her car and in the next moment, she was gone. He watched her taillights fade into the darkness and then began the trek home.

He needed time to himself before he could face another day without his daughter, another day under the heels of the bastard wolves, and yet another day without Caroline at his side.


End file.
